On the Move: A Life

by Oliver Sacks

But her words haunted me for much of my life and played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous expression of sexuality.

But he was determined to live as fully as he could in the time remaining to him; he married the Irish harpist and singer Mary O’Hara, went with her to New York, and died fifteen months later. He wrote much of his finest poetry in these last months.

Sacks claims he was "in love" and expereienced emotion, but his narrative here is cold and clinical. It is no small wonder thst he was perceived as "asexual." His mother efectively lobotomized any sexual nature he may have possessed. Bitch.

When its potential for abuse became apparent, the government had it doctored with a very unpleasant-tasting compound, triorthocresyl phosphate, or TOCP. But this hardly deterred drinkers, and it soon became apparent that TOCP was in fact a grave, albeit slow-acting, nerve poison. By the time this was realized, more than fifty thousand Americans had suffered extensive and often irreversible nerve damage.

a sense of wonder and mysteriousness, systems for appreciation of the beauty of art and science, had lost their balance in schizophrenia, producing a mental world overcharged with intense emotion and distortions of reality.

In England, one was classified (working class, middle class, upper class, whatever) as soon as one opened one’s mouth; one did not mix, one was not at ease, with people of a different class—a system which, if implicit, was nonetheless as rigid, as uncrossable, as the caste system in India.

I was summoned for a military interview but managed to persuade the powers that I was not suitable material for the army.

Makes one wonder if this persuasion involved a confession of his homosexuality. The US military during this time accepted few excuses for avoidance of military service. Sacks is very obtuse at times and it seems he still withholds information that he deems to be controversial.